Practicing socialism: Holocracy and motivation and effort considerations.

[Anonymous]

Debate : is holocracy adopted by capitalist a step in the right direction or a step in the wrong direction?  Capitalist business is adopting holocracy regardless of how we feel about it.  So what is our opinon of the news that capitalist organizations are adopting holocracy?  what if every capitalist business adopted holocracy?  would that be a step in the right direction or a step in the wrong direction?  

Anyone else interested in holocracy? it seems to me the best training and practicing material for introducing socialistic practices and concepts that a capitalist would tolerate.  It seems similar to communism using different words and more defined structure, or perhaps I might say for the communist purist that it's more friendly to communism.  Here's a bit about holocracy in their own words.  

Quote:

Holacracy is a complete, packaged system for self-management in organizations. Holacracy replaces the traditional management hierarchy with a new peer-to-peer “operating system” that increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility.

Through a transparent rule set and a tested meeting process, Holacracy allows businesses to distribute authority, empowering all employees to take a leadership role and make meaningful decisions.

http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/

I'd like to see if we can get enough support to do a comprehensive critique of holocracy as a group. Here's a link to the holocracy constitutio. http://www.holacracy.org/constitution .  It's rather complex reading and maybe not the best way to understand Holocracy, but given the people here are pretty fluent in constitutional document type reading, maybe our SPGB community doesn't need to practice Holocracy to understand it?  I see plenty of comments on this website about the need to practice communism as well as being informed about communism, so maybe that means the SPGB community will already get the idea more easily than capitalist.  Or maybe they'll be intrested enough to watch the videos or use the other holocracy resources for understanding how it works before trying to puzzle out the implications of the constitution rules.  What Holocracy says about Holocracy sounds a lot like what SPGB community commenters say about Communism.

Quote:

This constitution compiles the rules of Holacracy. However it is not meant as learning material — you don’t learn a new game by reading the rules. If you’re looking for an introduction, check out our How It Works page or read the Holacracy book.

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[twc]

Nothing to do with socialism.Socialism takes its stand on the class struggle.Society as presently constituted is split into two social classes:  one that has appropriated the means of subsistence from the other.All else in our social mode of life is subservient to this persistent social foundation of our society.All else in our society arises out of the necessity to reproduce life within the constraints of and upon the social foundation of ownership and control of social life by a part, and a part only, of society.That part of society, by virtue of its control over the life of all, cements itself as society’s ruling class—it owns society’s bat and ball and the playing field upon which its players must perform.All social life must conform to and is conditioned by its persistent class rule of the means of social life.This fundamental social relation of class ownership and class deprivation persists and reproduces itself, organically as Marx demonstrates in Capital.  It persists as the one constant—the defining constant—throughout this dynamic contingent chaotic crisis-prone social mode of production.Upon this universally persistent foundation of class ownership and control necessarily arises a state whose primary function is to maintain the persistence of class rule by ironing out the social issues it perpetually creates.Concomitantly, class politics arise out of the conceptions and misconceptions of the players who are condemned to accept the necessity of this persistent foundation as essential to their own day-to-day survival.And this fundamental class relation persists precisely in the scientific sense of an invariant of the social mode of production we call the capitalist mode of production.All else socially under the capitalist mode of production, no matter how objectively it confronts us in our daily lives, is merely a necessary form (phenomenal, or contingent, “form of appearance” in Marx’s terminology) of this essential persistent self-reproducing (with the aid of a necessarily coercive state) social class relation of private mis-appropriation of the means of production from the majority of human kind.And mis-appropriation is the correct term.  The working class was violently robbed—read the last chapters of Capital Volume 1 on “primitive accumulation”.If you seek further proof of the forced removal of the means of production from the working class in order to form a working class, look at recent history.You see the social creation of a dependent working class, in the teeth of denying official dogma and apologetics, that had necessarily to be implemented by brutal terror in the Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else in the world that capitalism established its private ownership of the social means (as it never has any choice but to do so) out of the foundation of former pre-capitalist modes of production in the modern world.“Capitalism comes into the world dripping with [working class] blood”—Marx.In the explicit terminology of capitalist political economy/economics:  the ruling class objectively robbed the working class of its means of production in the necessary process of creating it as a working class.Unlike the white-collar crime that arises after its foundation, the foundational robbing of the working class was brutal and protracted until submission was ultimately enforced by the efficacy of the absolutely necessary class-society state.World socialists aim to end the persistence of this capitalist mode of production-by-deprivation by permanently preventing the means of life from being used as capital, i.e. by implementing a higher transcendent social principle of persistence — the conversion of the social means of life into the common possession of all mankind with their use democratically controlled by all, under which society produces and reproduces a cooperative mode of social existence.Until you comprehend the centrality and significance for us of the foundational social condition of our Object that necessarily generates and maintains socialism as a global system of social reproduction, your consultant-style capitalist business organisational pop sociology is bound to strike us as irrelevant vapid trivial pontification, scarcely worth our consideration in the scheme of social things that matter to us about humanity and its future.Only once humanity has gained common ownership and control over its means of reproducing its social life do schemes like your organisational model float up to be placed as one among other items of possible importance on humanity’s social agenda.World socialists have a more pressing goal to pursue.

[Anonymous]

twc wrote:

Nothing to do with socialism.Socialism takes its stand on the class struggle.Society as presently constituted is split into two social classes:  one that has appropriated the means of subsistence from the other.All else in our social mode of life is subservient to this persistent social foundation of our society.All else in our society arises out of the necessity to reproduce life within the constraints of and upon the social foundation of ownership and control of social life by a part, and a part only, of society.That part of society, by virtue of its control over the life of all, cements itself as society’s ruling class—it owns society’s bat and ball and the playing field upon which its players must perform.All social life must conform to and is conditioned by its persistent class rule of the means of social life.This fundamental social relation of class ownership and class deprivation persists and reproduces itself, organically as Marx demonstrates in Capital.  It persists as the one constant—the defining constant—throughout this dynamic contingent chaotic crisis-prone social mode of production.Upon this universally persistent foundation of class ownership and control necessarily arises a state whose primary function is to maintain the persistence of class rule by ironing out the social issues it perpetually creates.Concomitantly, class politics arise out of the conceptions and misconceptions of the players who are condemned to accept the necessity of this persistent foundation as essential to their own day-to-day survival.And this fundamental class relation persists precisely in the scientific sense of an invariant of the social mode of production we call the capitalist mode of production.All else socially under the capitalist mode of production, no matter how objectively it confronts us in our daily lives, is merely a necessary form (phenomenal, or contingent, “form of appearance” in Marx’s terminology) of this essential persistent self-reproducing (with the aid of a necessarily coercive state) social class relation of private mis-appropriation of the means of production from the majority of human kind.And mis-appropriation is the correct term.  The working class was violently robbed—read the last chapters of Capital Volume 1 on “primitive accumulation”.If you seek further proof of the forced removal of the means of production from the working class in order to form a working class, look at recent history.You see the social creation of a dependent working class, in the teeth of denying official dogma and apologetics, that had necessarily to be implemented by brutal terror in the Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else in the world that capitalism established its private ownership of the social means (as it never has any choice but to do so) out of the foundation of former pre-capitalist modes of production in the modern world.“Capitalism comes into the world dripping with [working class] blood”—Marx.In the explicit terminology of capitalist political economy/economics:  the ruling class objectively robbed the working class of its means of production in the necessary process of creating it as a working class.Unlike the white-collar crime that arises after its foundation, the foundational robbing of the working class was brutal and protracted until submission was ultimately enforced by the efficacy of the absolutely necessary class-society state.World socialists aim to end the persistence of this capitalist mode of production-by-deprivation by permanently preventing the means of life from being used as capital, i.e. by implementing a higher transcendent social principle of persistence — the conversion of the social means of life into the common possession of all mankind with their use democratically controlled by all, under which society produces and reproduces a cooperative mode of social existence.Until you comprehend the centrality and significance for us of the foundational social condition of our Object that necessarily generates and maintains socialism as a global system of social reproduction, your consultant-style capitalist business organisational pop sociology is bound to strike us as irrelevant vapid trivial pontification, scarcely worth our consideration in the scheme of social things that matter to us about humanity and its future.Only once humanity has gained common ownership and control over its means of reproducing its social life do schemes like your organisational model float up to be placed as one among other items of possible importance on humanity’s social agenda.World socialists have a more pressing goal to pursue.

You are right. That has nothing to do with our socialist objective and aspirations. Socialism has always be my first love since I was very young and I never needed  all those artificial things to become a socialist. I grew up in the middle of the class struggle, and taking risks,  and i learned with peoples which took socialism as a serious situation. I never needed survey, the internet, and all those 'petty bourgeoisie toys which we would probably call it  in those days.The internet is a very good source of information and communication, but it does not replace the class struggle, and the communication with the workers on the streets, protests, marches, and strikes, seating on a  rocking chair, or an office,  nobody is going work in the process of obtaining class consciousness.The army are defected, or given victory when the two opposite armies confront each other face to face, the class struggle is the same case, I am not a capitalist lover, and I do not love their system, it is not my systemSometimes I might sound hard because I was forged with fires and I do not fool around with the socialist principles. For me, this is something very serious

[Anonymous]

twc wrote:

Nothing to do with socialism.

I disagree that Holocracy has nothing to do with socialism.it's an information tool that's extremely good at promoting socialistic ideas and practices in a business group in a capitalist society.  I think you need that if you're going to reach a majority of the poeple on the planet and convince them to support socialism.Without it you have a bunch of people in a company making decisions based on who gets paid the most in an authoritarian decision making hierarchy.   With it you have a bunch of people making decision based on structured association and a constitution that follows many of the principles of socialism. Holocracy is proposed as one of many information tools helpfull in developing the practice and habbits of thinking using communism and socialist principles.  

[Anonymous]

mcolome1 wrote:

You are right. That has nothing to do with our socialist objective and aspirations. 

I don't believe your limited idea of relevance is shared by the community as whole.  

mcolome1 wrote:

The internet is a very good source of information and communication, but it does not replace the class struggle, and the communication with the workers on the streets, protests, marches, and strikes, seating on a  rocking chair, or an office,  nobody is going work in the process of obtaining class consciousness.

Holocracy is going to work in the process of training class conciousness, and it teaches by the way it works lot of other things you need for a communist society to function. 

[Anonymous]

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

mcolome1 wrote:

You are right. That has nothing to do with our socialist objective and aspirations. 

I don't believe your limited idea of relevance is shared by the community as whole.  

mcolome1 wrote:

The internet is a very good source of information and communication, but it does not replace the class struggle, and the communication with the workers on the streets, protests, marches, and strikes, seating on a  rocking chair, or an office,  nobody is going work in the process of obtaining class consciousness.

Holocracy is going to work in the process of training class conciousness, and it teaches by the way it works lot of other things you need for a communist society to function. 

I ask you again: What is your comission on this business deal. It would be like Microsoft running a campaign for socialism, orf the enemies of the working running a campaign for the workers. Who are you tring to fool ?  Is your paycheck coming from Washington ?  Who is the community ? 

[Anonymous]

mcolome1 wrote:

I ask you again: What is your comission on this business deal. It would be like Microsoft running a campaign for socialism, orf the enemies of the working running a campaign for the workers. Who are you tring to fool ?  Is your paycheck coming from Washington ?  Who is the community ? 

I have no affiliation with Holocracy.  I stumbled upon it while looking for solutions to our communication problems at a non-profit collective as an unpaid volunteer.  I've never received any money from them and never expect to. You can check my posting by clicking on my name. Here's one that might convince you where I discuss the SPGB website and the upcoming revisions to it. http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/website-technical/spgb-website-upgrade-project#new AND here's another comment I made where I discuss marketing and media strategies to promote communism with suggestions for how to make our media mailers more communistic.  http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/no-junk-mail?page=1#newLike you I have a lot of well developed opinons and Holocracy is just one of the many information tools I consider for use supporting communism.  I'm not a salesperson and deplore everything about selling.  I am extremely smart well read on information theory, communication theory, propaganda, media, design, human perception, etc.  Also, Capitalism pisses me off, and the evils of capitalism have fallen on me much more than the average person in my 47 years (I'm old, but probably not as old as you claimed to be).  Most of my jobs have involved making software and business information systems easier to use, but generally my employers have asked me to put profits ahead of the peope (aka users) which is morally unnaceptable to me so I refuse and get fired or pushed out or marginilzed, etc.  I've spend most of much of my life thinking about how business could be made to work better for the people instead of just better for the rich.  My skill set and experience makes me very good at manipulating public opinion and changing how people think and act in relation to computers.  Most of the job opportunities for people with my skills and talent involve manipulating people and public opinion and changing how people act in ways that are morally objectionable, so I'm unemployed because I refuse to put profit before people.  Discussions here are my chance to use all my incredible talent and understanding for a morally beneficial cause. That's why I post to this website.  

[robbo203]

mcolome1 wrote:

 I ask you again: What is your commission on this business deal. It would be like Microsoft running a campaign for socialism, of the enemies of the working running a campaign for the workers. Who are you tring to fool ?  Is your paycheck coming from Washington ?  Who is the community ? 

Again, Marcos, why are you saying these things about this contributor? What business deal?  What are you talking about? You are beginning to sound like a conspiracy theorist and it is beginning to irritateFrom where I am standing, the guy is simply putting forward a kind of organisational tool that would lead to flatter and less hierarchical organisations.  I don't say I necessarily agree with the principle of holacracy and  part of me is skeptical about the claim that these principles can also be applied to capitalist business enterprises as well. However I don't know enough about the subject to comment authoritatively on it. But I am curious.  All socialists  should be curious and open minded enough to investigate things  for themselves – not just holacracy but other things too.  We shouldn't be so damned dismissive about everything as if we know everything there is to know and everyone else is just an ignorant fool.  The world is a little more complex than that

[twc]

All of the advertised Holacracy sites I explored were designed to facilitate profit making businesses.Quite so.  Profit making is the goal of all labour under capitalism.  Labour’s sole productive function is to expand the capital that sets it in motion.No matter how effectively the labour process is organized it always remains subservient to the expansion of the capital invested in it.If Holacratic organization impedes profit taking, it destroys its rationale for existing.  If Holacracy aids profit taking, it serves its essential capitalist purpose.  In neither case is it remotely socialist.But Holacracy may lubricate the socially necessary willingness on the part of the laborer to submit to being daily exploited by capital’s need for continual valorization.How the laborer conceives or misconceives capital’s domination over his/her working life activity is quite another matter, for workers are easily misled by organizational process restructuring solutions, without asking “solutions to exactly capitalist what?”Holacracy comes across as another, perhaps worthy (in the capitalist sense) methodology, in the mix of organizational structuring tools.  It is not socialist, it was never intended to be socialist, and its exemplar implementations are defiantly capitalist.

[Anonymous]

mcolome1 wrote:

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

mcolome1 wrote:

You are right. That has nothing to do with our socialist objective and aspirations. 

I don't believe your limited idea of relevance is shared by the community as whole.  

mcolome1 wrote:

The internet is a very good source of information and communication, but it does not replace the class struggle, and the communication with the workers on the streets, protests, marches, and strikes, seating on a  rocking chair, or an office,  nobody is going work in the process of obtaining class consciousness.

Holocracy is going to work in the process of training class conciousness, and it teaches by the way it works lot of other things you need for a communist society to function. 

I ask you again: What is your comission on this business deal. It would be like Microsoft running a campaign for socialism, or the enemies of the working class running a campaign for the workers. Who are you tring to fool ?  Is your paycheck coming from Washington ?  Who is the community ? 

[moderator1]

Reminder: 6. Do not make repeated postings of the same or similar messages to the same thread, or to multiple threads or forums (‘cross-posting’). Do not make multiple postings within a thread that could be consolidated into a single post (‘serial posting’). Do not post an excessive number of threads, posts, or private messages within a limited period of time (‘flooding’).

[Anonymous]

robbo203 wrote:

mcolome1 wrote:

 I ask you again: What is your commission on this business deal. It would be like Microsoft running a campaign for socialism, of the enemies of the working running a campaign for the workers. Who are you tring to fool ?  Is your paycheck coming from Washington ?  Who is the community ? 

Again, Marcos, why are you saying these things about this contributor? What business deal?  What are you talking about? You are beginning to sound like a conspiracy theorist and it is beginning to irritateFrom where I am standing, the guy is simply putting forward a kind of organisational tool that would lead to flatter and less hierarchical organisations.  I don't say I necessarily agree with the principle of holacracy and  part of me is skeptical about the claim that these principles can also be applied to capitalist business enterprises as well. However I don't know enough about the subject to comment authoritatively on it. But I am curious.  All socialists  should be curious and open minded enough to investigate things  for themselves – not just holacracy but other things too.  We shouldn't be so damned dismissive about everything as if we know everything there is to know and everyone else is just an ignorant fool.  The world is a little more complex than that

I think you are very naive, I know what I am doing, and I know what I am talking about, I have been dealing with this type of person in this movement for many years, this is just a review for me. I have dealt with this  business mentality too, and I hate that world, and I have had the opportunity to become rich, but I never wanted to exploit others human being like meI do not know why you are defending a right winger anti-communist,  a person that calls socialism and archaic, an obtuse philosophy, a person with that conception about socialism would never have any interest in the advancement of socialism, it would be like using a right winger from Miami for the advancement of the working class movement, and I know those by heart tooIn the society where he grew up everything is done for money, there is not any philanthropic mentality, a society that support killing for money.. I know about business because I come from a family of business peoples, and  after I was studying Medicine I studied business and Law and I cleaned my ass  with both, and I have owned business too, but i decided to live a simple life, and I went back to study MedicineI have been dealing with discussion forum for many years since the first time that yahoo implemented it, and I have been dealing with software for many years,  business and scientific language,  and I have always used Linux or Unix for many years too,  Microsoft is in my trash can, if peoples claim all the crashes from Microsoft, Bill Gates would be in a corner collecting money and playing with a guitarIn the internet,  we have had this kind of trolls all the time. It is nothing new for me, they started being very philanthropic and they are wolf dressed as lambs, and they are dangerous too, they do anything in order to make money, they are capitalist lovers, and the software that he  is proposing is a capitalist based technology business oriented, and capitalism without profits is deadSocialist Party is stuck at the present time in obtaining more members,  because workers are not interested in that kind of ideas at the present time,most of the workers love capitalism,  and it is not a  problem of application of technology.When I joined the WSM, it was unknown in the Spanish ( Castelian )  speaking world, because it was an Euro Centrist/English  organization unknown to others languages, and I was able to make it  known in Latin America and Spain by just using yahoo without any sophisticated business technology.. Only one person joined the WSM, and he was a LeinistI did it for free, despite the fact that I was discriminated when I joined this organization, and I have invested more  times in this organization than many old members, and I have been blocked in many forums trying to spread the ideas of real communism, it has been done by Leninists Trotskyists and Castroists, I do not think you have had that kind of experience either, but I know how to deal with them, i do not know them  from the outside, i do know if from the inside up to the  level of the central committees.There is another one like him in this forum who  came to me, but she did not know that I was an old fox, I can see them miles away, but there was a member who  fall in her trap, and I tell the truth in the internet and in front of their faces, because I am not scare of anybody including dictators, and the only person that can give me orders is an old man that is my idol, and my leaderLeninists organizations are more popular than the Socialist Party and they are also stuck, and workers do not want to join them, and they have more resources than us, only the ones that are extremely reformists are surviving , they are all dead, and I have seen many that have died completely, and the members are in stampede.  You can implement hundred of technological procedures for the Socialist Party and nobody will join it at the present, because most peoples do not care about it, only a few group of peoples are interested in known about a future society without money and without state, and most peoples that it is impossible to do that, most peoples love reformism. I have tried it in many ways

[Anonymous]

moderator1 wrote:

Reminder: 6. Do not make repeated postings of the same or similar messages to the same thread, or to multiple threads or forums (‘cross-posting’). Do not make multiple postings within a thread that could be consolidated into a single post (‘serial posting’). Do not post an excessive number of threads, posts, or private messages within a limited period of time (‘flooding’).

It is the same old post. It was corrected. 

[Anonymous]

twc wrote:

All of the advertised Holacracy sites I explored were designed to facilitate profit making businesses.Quite so.  Profit making is the goal of all labour under capitalism.  Labour’s sole productive function is to expand the capital that sets it in motion.No matter how effectively the labour process is organized it always remains subservient to the expansion of the capital invested in it.If Holacratic organization impedes profit taking, it destroys its rationale for existing.  If Holacracy aids profit taking, it serves its essential capitalist purpose.  In neither case is it remotely socialist.But Holacracy may lubricate the socially necessary willingness on the part of the laborer to submit to being daily exploited by capital’s need for continual valorization.How the laborer conceives or misconceives capital’s domination over his/her working life activity is quite another matter, for workers are easily misled by organizational process restructuring solutions, without asking “solutions to exactly capitalist what?”Holacracy comes across as another, perhaps worthy (in the capitalist sense) methodology, in the mix of organizational structuring tools.  It is not socialist, it was never intended to be socialist, and its exemplar implementations are defiantly capitalist.

Have we forgotten about the Fetishism of the Commodity ? Reading books and citing books is one thing, but understanding what we have read is something different. I have learned to summarize   everything   in my mind using simple terms. My good old friend Isaac knew Marx by heart, ( including Capital )  he was a hillbilly but he used simple terms. You have hit the nail on the head

[Anonymous]

mcolome1 wrote:

…and I have always used Linux or Unix for many years too. Microsoft is in my trash can, if peoples claim all the crashes from Microsoft, Bill Gates would be in a corner collecting money and playing with a guitar.

Spot on; my sentiment entirely. 

[Author]

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